Welcome to Part 3 of our week-long Tomb Raider: Anniversary blowout. Today, we conclude our interview with game designer Jason Botta as he talks about the new Egypt level and the game's special bonus features.
How has Egypt changed in comparison to the original game?
The Egypt level is actually very, very similar to the original in the puzzles, the scope and the layout of things. Our approach to all of the levels was to go back, play look through and look at all of the areas from the original and pick out the areas people would remember because there was something interesting there or there was a really cool memorable moment or the art was really great, or something along those lines and then recreate as many of those as possible and then connect them all up together.
So with Peru and Egypt and Greece and all of the rest of the levels - we really wanted to pick all of the really good parts and then leave out all of the less interesting hallway traversal or what-not, so Egypt is very similar in that all of the areas that you should remember, that were very interesting in the original, are back. And our approach to how we redid areas was we looked at them and we analyzed are they good, do they work, do we need to add more architecture or realign things to give them a more believable spin, do we layer on extra layering and complexity of the puzzles... for Egypt I think we kept everything fairly close to the original in theme and layout and what-not.
